rothbardian

That sounds like great advice -- thanks Viper. Vividian has so many setup options, wow. Which of the 5 depth of field choices do you guys recommend for pretty but functional gameplay (as opposed to screen archery)? The options are Photographic, Light, Medium, Medium with no sky blurring, and Heavy. Also curious if there's a consensus on "ENB sharpening options": soften, sharpen, or default? Lastly, SMAA antialiasing...if I enable it and want to turn it off later, does it require a full uninstall and reinstall of Vividian?

Just watched the Vividian install video on its Nexus page (30 mins!) and the narrator says here that his frame rate in his demo footage sucks because Skyrim 'doesn't like' SLI. Does that mean I should disable one of the 980Ti's when running Skyrim?

Sorry Talos, what is RS? To do your combo of Vividian/ELE/RS, is that covered in the guide?

Good to know there's a general consensus about Vividian, thanks. Does bothering with CoT seem worthwhile, or is Vividian's weather system comparably good? I also see Purity, ELE, RCRN. Which of those would you recommend (if any) to combine with Vividian? Yeah, the 980Ti is a monster, and in SLI it is insane. I'm playing Lords of the Fallen maxed out at 1440p and its buttery smooth. I often just stop to appreciate just how amazing games look these days. If you had given me a glimpse of games today back when I was a kid, I never would have believed it. :)

My 980Ti cards have 6GB of vram. Is this enough to default to the hi-res versions of all the STEP texture mods? (I run on a single 1440p panel.) For a high-end machine is there any consensus about what the best 2 or 3 ENBs are? I know there's a lot of subjectivity here, but if you want to stay reasonably close to the vanilla look and feel of Skyrim, and performance isn't a bottleneck, is there a go-to choice that is gorgeous but also well-tested (i.e. doesn't have areas that are unfinished/buggy)?

You may be 100% right about it only taking me 6-8 hours. I was just going by what other people have posted and figuring I'm in the same boat since I don't have modding experience. Given a high end spec machine, are there any other tricky-ish mods besides ddsopt and dyndolod which can be set aside?

Thank you, Viper, for the very helpful advice! Dyndolod does look intimidating. I think with my new machine that I could probably skip it and be okay. Phazer, your points are well taken, thanks. I wasn't expecting that I could eliminate the startup time, but maybe with an expert's help get it down to the 3-5 hour range. That would be worth a lot to me. Even with Viper's advice it seems like I'd still be looking at 20-25 hours, which I'm unfortunately not in a position to do. It sounds like the mod compilations could be a massive time saver. Are you aiming to have "mod bundles" on a topic basis, like one for environment textures and one for game bug fixes?

I've been poking around here for quite a while and am truly amazed at the depth of knowledge and support of the STEP community. I've held off jumping into STEP because for people like me who don't have prior modding experience, the learning curve for getting up to speed on the tools and then implementing the entire STEP guide from scratch can be a 25-35 hour proposition. I have a very heavy work schedule and can't afford that kind of time commitment. But, I'm determined to play STEP in all its glory! Though a stunning amount of knowledge is shared here freely and generously, I'd like to compensate somebody to help me dramatically reduce my STEP install time. In other words, I'd like to pay somebody to be my "STEP sherpa" -- meaning, somebody who could bundle up and send me the STEP assets with a short list of install steps to follow. A benefit of working a lot is I can save money. I just took delivery of an extremely capable gaming rig (see sig) that takes the need for performance tuning off the table. That should save time and simplify a lot of performance vs quality decision making. If you're interested in helping me out, please send me a message. Thanks.

I'm looking at getting a Titan X card to drive the Acer XB270HU I just picked up, and I'm wondering if 12gb of VRAM will cause problems in Skyrim. I ask because I vaguely remember somebody here saying something about that. If it does, is there a fix or workaround? Thanks.

No inflammatory meaning implied by me at all. It's just that the learning curve for a proper STEP install is huge for a newb like me (just saw another thread where a guy mentioned he's 6 hours in with a long way to go), which made me wonder how this compares with Workshop (which I've never tried). I'm curious for those who have if Workshop is a disaster in terms of causing compatibility or stability issues, or if you get ~80% of the benefit with ~20% of the effort compared to STEP.

I'm just curious, do people who use Steam Workshop to install their mods have endless problems? Given all the special steps for ordering, patching, etc in STEP, I was just wondering if Workshop is a total fiasco for Skyrim players. #Mod Edit: Changed title to better reflect on the question of OP. -torminater

Thanks for the reply, Michael! For newbs like me, it's juggling the interaction of all the tools like Wrye, LOOT, TES5 etc. and the 'merging', 'cleaning', 'patching' etc. which makes it feel overwhelming. Following instructions when you see them repeated on screen is so much easier than stepping through huge blocks of text. Anyway, thanks again for all your contributions. I really appreciate it!

If one of the GamerPoets mavens is here, or perhaps another STEP team member, I'd love to ask if possible for a tutorial series on installing Neovalen's Skyrim Revisited: Legendary Edition. For a noob it is very intimidating, and these videos are just fantastic. Thank you so much for providing them!

Thanks for the suggestions, Crime. I'm thinking of getting an SLI desktop, so I think I'd be able to drive the resolution. I'm more wondering if the GUI goes on the fritz at 4k or if it 'just works'...i.e. how much tweaking and fiddling would be necessary to make things run/look right.

Hey Aiyen, just speaking as a noob, Skylight looks amazing, but merging esp's and patching regions are intimidating. Hence my desire for a one-stop/turnkey way to get the most ENB and weather bang for the buck. Seems like Vividian and T.A.Z. are the two front-runners unless somebody else has another insight.

I'm thinking of buying the Asus 31" 4k monitor. At a native res of 3840x2160 it's roughly 4x the pixels of a 1080p monitor, so I'm wondering if anybody has already been down this road and can share their experience. Any advice/guidance on whether there are GUI or other issues in Skyrim at this res? Does the HUD scale properly? Thanks.

Thank you Greg!

Thanks Crime! Since the unofficial patches and SKSE are grandfathered in, are there 2 more that come to mind?

Fantastic, thank you! Looking forward to seeing what else come down the pike. :)

Thanks Nozzer66! I edited the OP to assume the unofficial patches and SKSE were already installed. So if you had 2 more to go, what would they be?

Thanks pStyl3! I of course agree that value is subjective, hence there's no such thing as an objective top 10. But I'm not an experienced player so am hoping to learn from veterans' views on this. :) For instance it's fascinating to me that the book covers mod would come at the exclusion of an ENB or Starac's textures. Based on your response I'm going to edit my original post to include the bug fixes and SKSE since those are more infrastructure related. So if you had 2 more to pick, care to share what they'd be? Thank you again for the list!

If you were going to give a friend Skyrim and install 10 mods to give him/her the best experience possible (assume a fast PC), what would be your top picks? Thanks for the input! Edit: thanks to pStyl3's list, assume the unofficial bug fix patches and SKSE are already installed, so any 10 other than those. :)

Got it, thanks. So if one wants to steer clear of CoT but still get the best graphical and weather bang for the buck on a zippy machine, Vividian or T.A.Z. are the best bets? (I don't see anything about weather overhauls on the Skylight page. Serenity ExtendedFX seems like it might but I can't tell for sure.)

Thanks. I was just checking out Vividian's page -- since it says it supports CoT, does that mean it overwrites Vividian's own weather overhaul? Because I'm not a sophisticated modder or good at debugging, I'm looking/hoping for simplicity and awesomeness. :) https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/36067/?

Thanks for the list! Seems T.A.Z. is the only one that rehauls weather? I'm planning to do a clean install and the idea of not having to deal with CoT seems appealing. I also see there's a new Serenity ('extendedFX'). Anybody tried it? STEP compatible? https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/62411/?